February 22, 2013 - Oregon State Bar

Law Schools’ Applications Fall as Costs Rise and Jobs Are Cut - NYTim...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/31/education/law-schools-applications-...
2 of 3 1/31/2013 8:28 AM
In addition, legal forms are now available online and require training well below a lawyer’s to fill
them out.
In recent years there has also been publicity about the debt load and declining job prospects for
law graduates, especially of schools that do not generally provide employees to elite firms in major
cities. Last spring, the American Bar Association released a study showing that within nine months
of graduation in 2011, only 55 percent of those who finished law school found full-time jobs that
required passage of the bar exam.
“Students are doing the math,” said Michelle J. Anderson, dean of the City University of New York
School of Law. “Most law schools are too expensive, the debt coming out is too high and the
prospect of attaining a six-figure-income job is limited.”
Mr. Tamanaha of Washington University said the rise in tuition and debt was central to the
decrease in applications. In 2001, he said, the average tuition for private law school was $23,000;
in 2012 it was $40,500 (for public law schools the figures were $8,500 and $23,600). He said that
90 percent of law students finance their education by taking on debt. And among private law
school graduates, the average debt in 2001 was $70,000; in 2011 it was $125,000.
“We have been sharply increasing tuition during a low-inflation period,” he said of law schools
collectively, noting that a year at a New York City law school can run to more than $80,000
including lodging and food. “And we have been maximizing our revenue. There is no other way to
describe it. We will continue to need lawyers, but we need to bring the price down.”
Some argue that the drop is an indictment of the legal training itself — a failure to keep up with the
profession’s needs.
“We have a significant mismatch between demand and supply,” said Gillian K. Hadfield, professor
of law and economics at the University of Southern California. “It’s not a problem of producing too
many lawyers. Actually, we have an exploding demand for both ordinary folk lawyers and big
corporate ones.”
She said that, given the structure of the legal profession, it was hard to make a living dealing with
matters like mortgage and divorce, and that big corporations were dissatisfied with what they see
as the overly academic training at elite law schools.
The drop in law school applications is unlike what is happening in almost any other graduate or
professional training, except perhaps to veterinarians. Medical school applications have been
rising steadily for the past decade.
Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, said applicants to master of
business degrees were steady — a 0.8 percent increase among Americans in 2011 after a decade of
substantial growth. But growth in foreign student applications — 13 percent over the same period
— made up the difference, something from which law schools cannot benefit, since foreigners have